March 15, 1999
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TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICE: S
RAMADORAI Unlisted King "Knowledge breeds more knowledge, and revenues".
Led by Kohli, TCS was quick to strike a relationship with Burroughs (later Unisys) and Ramadorai was the first engineer to be trained on the B -- 1728, the machine bought by TCS for Rs 45 lakh. By 1979, TCS had set up an office in New York to provide customer-information services and, in 1980, it was processing credit cards for American Express. "Knowledge breeds more knowledge, and revenues," Ramadorai says. Today, TCS is Asia's largest global software and services company with a worldwide client list of 500, ranging from Nokia to Nike. Of its turnover of Rs 1,060 crore (1997-98), Rs 900 crore came from export of software services. The company is not listed on the stock exchange, but its "theoretical" market capitalisation is estimated at over Rs 15,000 crore, double that of Infosys. It's the volume king, number one in everything you can think of: be it in the routine Y2K fixing jobs or the complex information systems programming it is doing for its international clients. On the chessboard of the Indian software market, TCS is supreme. Its crown is made of history and size. And its emotional closeness to India. It has helped develop the taxpayers' Permanent Account Number (PAN) and is now imparting the knowledge of how to bill utilities like power and water. |
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In 1972, when S. Ramadorai received a call
from F.C. Kohli of Tata Sons after a masters in computers from the US and a stint at
General Electric, little did he suspect that Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the
consultancy wing of the Tata Group's holding company, which he was joining would one day
become the country's most familiar calling card on the world's knowledge industry. And he
would be its chief executive officer. Kohli, 75, TCS' vice-chairman (Ratan Tata is the
chairman), is an acknowledged guru in information technology and is a director of the
prestigious New York-based Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), a
think tank that began pushing the cause of computers when it was in the pre-natal stage in
the '60s. Prompted by Kohli and the late P.M. Agarwala, another TCS founder, the company
acquired the IBM 1401 of 1969 vintage to begin payroll accounting and cost processing for
companies that would rather have done these on a typewriter. Ramadorai says, "I came
in to find that banks were coming to us for reconciliation work and universities for
tabulating examination results. It was a beginning." 
